Talking Businessly Daniel Coulbourne & John Drexler

Business is great. But that means Daniel doesn't have time to do strategic stuff. John is pulling back on client hours to figure out how to do outbound sales. We plan out an onsite (or is it offsite?). Finally, we review our OKRs.

Steve is the founder of a well established creative agency called fifteen4. Daniel used to work there! We asked Steve about how you do planning (especially with subcontractors) when you have lumpy sales cycles, and no predictable sales process. But he ended up giving us some free consulting on branding, positioning, and strategy for the target customers we want.

The sales strategy worked! Great leads are pouring in, and we're closing new business. We talk about our strategy on sales calls, and disqualifying ourselves quickly from the wrong kinds of leads. Also we are sleepy.

We want to find a long term partner, and we want your help. Then things come completely off the rails and we stop talking about business. John rants about healthcare "markets", we discuss Kendrick vs. J. Cole beef, and recommend tv shows.

We are looking for 2 big, gnarly, interesting projects to sink our teeth into over the next 6 months. And we want your help finding them. We also recap all of the smart little things we've learned from retrospectives in the last couple months.

We have an opportunity to do something big, difficult, and pretty different from our other clients. John went on the Over Engineered podcast to talk about whether sprints and estimates matter. We review our OKRs.